Off to the Side: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Banalilty with a capital B
Review: Harrison fans should steer clear of this nonesense. Two paragraphs about Brown Dog and endless dreck about Jack Nicholson. Stick to his stories; they're much more interesting and well written than this star-schtooping melange of junk.

Rating:
Summary: A lifetime of reading
Review: I remember walking into the Crawford County library in Grayling, Michigan over thirty years ago and reading a poem by Jim Harrison, thinking that he had completely restructured the way I thought about language. That began a thirty year obsession with Harrison and his work, especially the poems which I read almost daily.

He has illuminated my own writing career, such as it is. When I thought I was paying attention to the natural world, his work would remind me that I truly wasn't as perceptive as I imagined. Now, his interior life, which has always ridden close to the surface of his work, has been exhaustively mined and offered up to those of us who use Harrison's work as one might use a compass.

For me OFF TO THE SIDE is like getting a topographic map of a heart I have long admired. Poet, shaman, Zen fool in the tradition of Ikkyu, Harrison is the best antidote to a world ever-filling with greed, stupidity and blindness.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the exit?
Review: I started reading Jim Harrison in the seventies. I even liked the early books he doesn't. I read his poetry and kept track of his work up through Off to the Side. I subscribe to Esquire and Men's Journal so I read many of the "Raw and the Cooked" pieces and saw early printings of various novellas. (I read "Legends" in Esquire in one sitting at my kitchen table. Hey, I was born poor too) This is some context for my remarks. Who does one write a memoir for? I guess my hope is that a memoir by an author is for his readers. If you are hoping for this, you'll be disappointed. It seems this memoir was for Harrison and probably his family and a few close friends listed toward the end. As for people who have been reading his work, maybe we're just better off reading his work. When a writer writes a memoir, I am interested in understanding what he/she reads and how he/she reads. Harrison mentions a number of writers but he doesn't say much about what he got from them (except near the end when he reveals a bit of what Notes From the Underground meant for him). I am interested in how events shaped writing and thinking. What we get are anecdotes. Harrison knew many writers who I like to read but we learn nothing of interest through his encounters. Ultimately, this memoir seems to me self absorbed. As if it were time to do the "memoir" thing. I guess I was naïve enough to think that writers consider their readers, but I don't think Harrison knows anything about his readers except as schmucks who go to his book signings that he was trying mightily to get out of. (I've never been to a book signing.) Is Off to the Side entertaining? Yes. Is it well written in Harrison's distinctive voice? Yes. Did Harrison have a life interesting enough to write about? Yes. Do we learn anything about his writing or reading or his take on other writers and their ideas? No. The rating is higher than it probably should be, but like Harrison, I hate to admit that something I spent time on reading wasn't worth my time.

Rating:
Summary: I made it through!
Review: It was quite an accomplishment to make it through all of Harrison's puffery to get to the end. I don't think it was worth it. There are some really good sections including one on road trips as a way to break out of the duldrums and of course getting out into the woods - I loved his idea of finding "thickets" in which to escape and get back to normal. I can relate.

I'm a huge Harrison fan and love Sundog, Farmer, and Legends of the Fall the best. I just don't get much enjoyment out of is name dropping and arrogant attitude. He mentions his wife and family rarely and there's just a couple references about his writing and approach. I get the feeling he wrote this pretty fast and a couple chapters seem like stand-alone essays that were thrown in. This book could have used some good editing/pruning.

That said, Harrison is still tied for my favorite author and his books are prominent on my bookshelf.

Rating:
Summary: Portrait of the artist as a philosophical old drunk
Review: It's one of the most uniquely American career paths in literature. Boy grows up in the hinterland, discovers that he has received the divine ray of talent, follows his dreams and scrabbles for decades, then finally hits the big time in Hollywood.

The difference is that Harrison never lost touch with the land, much preferring to repair to his favorite hunting and fishing spots, and drink with the locals back home in Michigan, rather than toil away in the studios. Oh, he did lose his church unbringing, and G. K. Chesterton would surely call Harrison's idea of a private religion mere weakmindedness, but Harrison has undoubtedly consumed an adult portion of life, and he's here to tell us all about it.

As a biographical account of his life and career, this is much too misty. The reader must swim open seas of random impressions, interesting anecdotes, and barstool wisdom to get from one fact to the next. And they are not especially sequential, either. I guess that job will have to wait for a professional biographer.

But taken for what it is, this book is enjoyable. There's too much name-dropping in the Hollywood phase, though he is sincerely grateful to Jack Nicholson for his help breaking into pictures. But really--eating sandwiches with Art Garfunkel while betting on which skiers on a slope are going to wipe out? And there are dozens such little passing mentions. Maybe I'm just jealous...

His love of the land, of the countryside, of his hunting dogs, and his unsparing accounts of his own shortcomings and addictions and mistakes make this book one to respect. It may be a mishmash, it may not be the whole or unadulterated truth, but it is visibly a labor of love.

Rating:
Summary: Portrait of the artist as a philosophical old drunk
Review: It's one of the most uniquely American career paths in literature. Boy grows up in the hinterland, discovers that he has received the divine ray of talent, follows his dreams and scrabbles for decades, then finally hits the big time in Hollywood.

The difference is that Harrison never lost touch with the land, much preferring to repair to his favorite hunting and fishing spots, and drink with the locals back home in Michigan, rather than toil away in the studios. Oh, he did lose his church unbringing, and G. K. Chesterton would surely call Harrison's idea of a private religion mere weakmindedness, but Harrison has undoubtedly consumed an adult portion of life, and he's here to tell us all about it.

As a biographical account of his life and career, this is much too misty. The reader must swim open seas of random impressions, interesting anecdotes, and barstool wisdom to get from one fact to the next. And they are not especially sequential, either. I guess that job will have to wait for a professional biographer.

But taken for what it is, this book is enjoyable. There's too much name-dropping in the Hollywood phase, though he is sincerely grateful to Jack Nicholson for his help breaking into pictures. But really--eating sandwiches with Art Garfunkel while betting on which skiers on a slope are going to wipe out? And there are dozens such little passing mentions. Maybe I'm just jealous...

His love of the land, of the countryside, of his hunting dogs, and his unsparing accounts of his own shortcomings and addictions and mistakes make this book one to respect. It may be a mishmash, it may not be the whole or unadulterated truth, but it is visibly a labor of love.

Rating:
Summary: in praise of the candid
Review: When I finished this book, I felt much like the other reviewers. I thought the first half was great, and it finished strong in the very end, but my perception of Harrison was tarnished as one Hollywood name after another was trotted out during the screenplay writing phase. It was as if, caught within a pseudo-fame, he had to ensure his readers (or moreso himself) that he was in the game, whether we knew it or not.

Then, as the book settled in a bit, I began to realize that this was probably a relatively candid look at the man's professional life (I don't know him - I'm only guessing). True to his persona, he didn't fall into politically correct pressure - this time by not being modest about who he knows. Maybe this reveals just another one of his addicitons.

The only difference is that the other addictions he talks about have a mythological romance to them, evoking endearment in job-shackled readers and probably selling a lot of books for him. This particular vice repels people.

Nevertheless, whether he intended it or not, I felt the book revealed a man constantly torn between the seduction of Hollywood's powerful, fast pace and his cheap cars and favorite dogs rolling out to a fishing spot before hitting the local northern Michigan watering hole. I can relate.

His language is, as always, poetically beautiful and you can truly feel the passion of somebody who seems fascinated by the simple fact that he's alive.

Out of morbid curiosity, I would have liked to understand more how he maintained his family life with so much wild and carefree excess. But, then again, that's really none of my business.